Obesity, Cheap Food And Lack Of Responsibility

You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to know that if you buy cheap food it’s unlikely to have much nutritional value and could lead to obesity.

Combined with a lack of exercise, some degree of obesity is almost guaranteed

Apparently, though, obesity is not our fault.

Over the last decade we have become one of the unhealthiest, and obese, of all the member states in the EU. The NHS is hugely overstretched by treating obesity related illnesses while the cost to us all both in financial terms and loss of life is probably too great to estimate.

But it’s not our fault. We don’t have any personal control over our desire to shovel crap into our mouths. We are just Lemmings falling into the abyss of temptation.

According to a report by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges it’s really all the fault of fizzy drink manufacturers and food producers who put too much sugar and saturated fats into the cheap meals that just happen to fall into our shopping trolleys. They say it’s time to tax those bottles of pop and to stop advertising tempting delights on TV until after the watershed.

While their logic may be well meaning, it is flawed.

For starters, are they naive enough to believe that a tax levied on fizzy drinks is going to be reinvested in health schemes?

As for the watershed – scenes of an ‘adult nature’ are already banned from being shown on TV before 9pm but our population is still increasing and we have one of the highest rates of juvenile pregnancies in Europe.

In reality, some people would prefer to nosh on a family sized packet of salt and vinegar than have sex – while others are just too obese to even try (the latter one anyway!).

Bans and restrictions on personal choice will never work.; neither will placing the blame on food manufacturers while we continue to create the demand.

It is therefore logical that education and exercise, from an early age, are probably the key factors in reducing the trend towards bigger clothing sizes.

It’s too late to buy back the old school playing fields, sold to developers for a quick profit. It’s not too late to teach kids the difference between a carrot and a crispy pancake.

Professor Terence Stephenson, the chairman of the AMRC said:

“We didn’t hear from a single person who said they liked being overweight – everybody we met wanted help from the state and society.”

They didn’t however, seem to need much help from ‘state and society’ while in the process of emptying their food cupboards!